We've made our bed, now we can lie on it.

Every move has a few glitches, so international moves have to have at least twice as many … right? Our major furniture glitch was that the box springs for the queen-sized bed didn’t fit up the stairs and that the headboard came apart in transit. Mark and I “roughed it” with the mattress on the floor for a month and stored the box springs in the entry hall while we debated how best to repair the damage. We tried waiting for the moving company to come up with something (“We’ll take 90 days to process your claim; meanwhile, don’t do anything with the remaining pieces, or we’ll revoke your claim.”) or we could do something about it ourselves. Mark said the headboard was an easy fix – just use some L-brackets and wood glue to attach the shelf part to the part that actually holds the frame for the mattress. If it doesn’t work, we’re not out much on our fifteen-year-old headboard that is made from pressboard and very shiny veneer. After we lined up the two pieces of headboard, the gluing and bracketing went fairly quickly and yielded a headboard that was likely more solid than the first. Whew, one down, one to go.

The bigger question was how to get the box springs up the stairs. First, Mark peeled back the gray stuff on the bottom side to see the guts of our box springs. Yes, there are actual metal springs – and a wood frame – in there. So Mark sawed through the wooden frame, then we bent the box springs in half like a soft taco. Folding saved a lot of cutting and repair work over cutting! We tied up the taco with rope from the shed, then shoved the whole mess up the stairs. We untied it carefully, expecting it to spring open like a Jack-in-the box. It didn’t, but it stayed bent. We positioned people at both ends, while Mark installed metal braces to stabilize the sawn-through frame. Now we have a whole headboard, a bed-frame, the box springs on the second floor, and a mattress on top of it all. And it didn’t fall apart in the middle of the night!

Bonus: We have tons of extra space in the entry hall!